Imaging devices, such as laser printers, ink jet printers, etc. are utilized in numerous home and office applications. The increasing sophistication of both imaging devices and personal computers generally has resulted in heightened reliance upon fast and proper operation of the imaging devices in everyday home and work environments. For example, modern host devices provide faster processing and increased storage of data compared with devices of a few years ago, while imaging devices coupled with host devices have experienced significant advancements in color reproduction, resolution and other attributes.
Furthermore, computer networks that include imaging devices have also increased in sophistication, applications, and capabilities. Some computer networks include a production server (e.g., a printer server) configured to manage printing operations for a plurality of hosts of the computer network. In exemplary operations, the printer server can route print jobs to printers, and perform preliminary processing of print jobs. More recently, devices have been introduced to dynamically reroute jobs. For example, a job may initially be intended for printing using a given printer, but for an appropriate reason (e.g., the desired recipient printer is inoperable or off-line), the printer server may route the job to another printer. These more recent arrangements have benefits of providing increased assurance that a job would be imaged.
However, drawbacks may be experienced with rerouting of jobs to printers other than the originally desired destination. For example, a user may not know which printer of the system actually processed the job. In other implementations, it may be desired to reconfigure the devices of the computer network for job load balancing. However, impacts of rerouting are not known until rerouting is implemented which may be time consuming and costly.
At least some embodiments of the invention provide media imaging devices, systems and methods having improvements with respect to imaging operations and management of imaging operations.